Procrastination is the biggest reason that you are not productive enough. It is the reason why you are lining up with most of your unfinished business.
Productivity and procrastination are the opposite right? Let’s see how you can combine both of them and know how to use procrastination to your advantage.
Categorization of Tasks
Most of your tasks in a day lie under these three set of categories:
Set 1: The most important tasks.
These consists of those crucial tasks by which doing them at the very moment will have a huge impact on your life.
For example- working on your college project, writing a new blog article, making that important office presentation, planning out your finances.
Set 2: These include those tasks which are still important but not as important as Set 1 tasks.
For example- cleaning the house, answering emails, going to the gym, learn a new skill or a music instrument.
Then finally the Set 3 tasks:
These include those tasks which are not at all helpful. By doing these, you are wasting a huge amount of time.
For example- Watching TV, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook, spending sleepless nights on Netflix.
How to use procrastination to your advantage?
We spend most of our time with the Set 3 tasks which are not important to us. Everyone wants to be productive with the Set 1 tasks, and no matter how hard we try, sometimes we just can’t do it. So we procrastinate.
Procrastination doesn’t mean that we are doing nothing, or just sitting and staring at the wall. We are still doing something, which is the Set 3 tasks. Most of the time we jump on our couch in front of the TV scrolling through social media.
We are either highly productive with Set 1, or super lazy with Set 3. What would happen if we remove the Set 3 list? Or at least we can make it harder to do them, such as turning off the internet, unplugging the TV.
By doing this you can try to remove or at least lower the chance of the Set 3 option. You can replace it by doing something else. And that something else is Set 2 tasks. Sitting idle and staring at the wall is still an option, but you would get bored too quickly.
When you have a big project of yours to complete, but all you do is procrastinate, so take that as an advantage to do something which is still worthwhile doing it. And it is up to you to make sure that it is something from the Set 2 tasks.
So you can either take a short break and clean your room while listening to your favourite songs, answer some emails, write down some of your goals, brainstorm on new ideas, read a book or learn something new like singing, drawing or probably a new language. Be productive on something which is still worth doing it.
Let me give you one of my examples:
Writing an article takes a lot of time, and in today’s technological world it is very easy to get distracted.
I don’t know why, but while working I used to get many notifications on my phone and seeing it’s from whom, always distracted me a lot. And unknowingly I used to spend hours on unimportant things.
So what I did was, before working on my new article, I used to spend enough time on my phone so that its battery gets down to lower than 50%. Then I turn off my internet and I’m now forced to keep it on the charging mode, and that too it in a separate room.
Yeah, it sounds funny, but it actually worked for me. Sometimes I take short music breaks, clean my laptop and desk. In this way, I was able to clean my entire room and also read a few chapters of a book.
Conclusion:
Mostly we jump directly from Set 1 to Set 3 tasks, so I suggest is to jump from Set 1 to Set 2. All you have to do is prevent yourself from doing Set 3, unimportant tasks.
Not only in your work life, but you can also apply this in real life. Whenever you have something important to do and don’t feel like doing it at that time, then don’t jump straight to Set 3. Also, forcing yourself to carry on with Set 1 won’t make you more productive.
In this way, you will do something useful while procrastinating. You will procrastinate on important tasks productively. Thus you will become a productive procrastinator.
You can also try The 2 Minute Rule if you are struggling to be productive.
Thank you for reading!
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